How to Find and Hire the Best App Developers

Lena Voitenko

Communication manager

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Coming up with a great app idea is hard but not as hard as finding a great app development team. Experts estimate 2.3 million individuals working as mobile app developers worldwide. If you pick one of them without putting too much thought into that, you might run the risk of making a wrong choice. This article will provide you with a few tips on how to find app developers.

1. Choose a destination

Since we can’t possibly cover every single country on the globe to lighten up your journey, we can, at least, make a stop at the most common development locations. They are North America, the UK, India, and Ukraine. Heard of those, didn’t you?

North America accounts for more than half of the supply of information technology in the world. Silicon Valley speaks for itself, obviously. Other than that, the headquarters of the leading IT companies are located in the USA, even if their R&D offices are somewhere across the ocean. According to research by VisionMobile, though, North America is the third largest continent by the number of developers after Asia and Europe.

Speaking of Europe, guess where most app programmers hang out? You probably think it’s London or Berlin, and this is exactly what Google research found out. The Foggy Albion makes more than a third of revenues from mobile software in Europe, which is why it’s the second most important tech hub in the world after the USA. By the way, Berlin comes in the second in Europe.

India is a well-known place for outsourcing. Business there is concentrated in so-called IT-clusters, which include a local Silicon Valley — Bangalore. According to ZDNet, there are about 300K developers working in India.

Ukraine is in the Gartner’s list of top 30 outsourcing destinations. Ukrainian programmers get frequently employed by companies and individual entrepreneurs from Western Europe, UK, the USA and Canada. A prominent educational legacy from the Soviet epoch contributed to intellectual potential of the local developers, who are highly reputable for the quality of their work.

At the same time, Ukrainian developers can afford lower rates compared to those in the USA, Western Europe, and Australia, without compromising on quality. An average cost for development services in Ukraine ranges between $25 and $50 per hour, and about the same, $30-$50, for mobile app design.

2. Check app developer’s profiles

Those looking for an answer to «how do I find an app developer?» usually start their research on a freelance website, where they can check a candidate’s profile, a list of clients and their references, and also, projects.

Freelance websites where you can find developers for hire

—Upwork is a great place where you can hire mobile app developers. It offers both hourly and fixed price jobs. It also has time-tracking tools to ensure the guaranteed payment.

Networks for designers can be a great resource for finding app developers, since many teams provide design along with iOS and Android development services.

You should definitely check Dribbble, a community of designers and design teams, where you can stay glued to the screen for hours. Behance is another spot for inspiration and a destination for programmer talents. It allows designers to create bigger project, rather than upload shots. You can definitely find a great team on one of these sites!

Great design is not everything when it comes to hiring the best app developers. Perfection in code combined with excellent visual implementation is what makes a team really stand out. The easiest way to check some samples of source code is to visit GitHub.

Tech blogs

Hey! This is where you are now :)

3. Make a list of candidates

At the first glance, it may seem that finding a developer isn’t that difficult. But once you found someone, you need to make sure this app builder can meet your expectations. We wouldn’t advise you to snap up the cheapest or the fastest offers. We’d recommend you to make a list of the candidates at first.

This depends on whether you can manage the process of development and on the degree to which you can manage and lead the project on your side. Even if you have some serious tech chops, it’s quite a risk to hire a freelancer, since managing people located miles away from you is extremely difficult, especially if you don’t have a real experience of working with tech teams.

An app design agency, on the other hand, is supposed to provide you with project management services in addition to developers, designers, QA specialists. They have a specific strategy for work, elaborated standards of communication, and quality control, as well as a workflow process that will get you where you need to be.

Unless there is a small task that can be handed off to a freelancer, we’d recommend you to choose only companies for your «candidate» list.

4. Сompare

Once you have the list of candidates, you should ask them a lot of different questions which can help you make the right choice. Here are some of them:

1) Where can I find any examples of the mobile apps you’ve built?

Experienced mobile app developers are always ready to provide you with apps they’ve built including those that aren’t in their portfolio. You should be able to find these apps in the App Store or Google Play. This will allow you to not only get some idea of their experience and skills, but most importantly, understand if this company is capable of delivering a mobile app you are looking for.

Another important suggestion is to pay attention to company’s website, and not only a portfolio page. App creators with old-fashioned, uninformative and plain sites simply can’t build great products! If they don’t care about what their own service looks like, they won’t care about your app in the first place.

2) How can you guarantee the quality of your development effort?

Top Android or iOS developers have certain standards of quality which ensure effectiveness of their service. These standards of quality should combine a set of tools, methods and techniques used to achieve consistent and stable architecture in the project, reusable code, and excellent user experience.

If you are not a technical person and can’t judge technical skills, you’d better rely on the recommendations of someone you trust, who has the skills and experience to help you review code samples of your candidates.

3) May I have a list of your current and previous clients?

The list of clients and their references can tell you more than several Skype calls with programmers. You will perfectly understand how responsive, reliable and result-oriented the team is by contacting some of their previous clients. Don’t be afraid to ask for more references and don’t forget that some of your candidates will offer you only positive reviews.

4) How will we communicate during the development process?

The final result of collaboration with a team strongly depends on how often you communicated and how well you understood each other during the process of building a product. Communication is the most important aspect in working with remote teams. It combines a number of online tools and reporting approaches that ensure transparency of the development process.

A good team will provide you with daily chats, group and individual calls, weekly status reports and a demo at the end of each iteration.

If an app design agency doesn’t let you talk to each member of the team limiting your communication to a manager only, you should question their efficiency. The same applies for when an app creator doesn’t allow you to review the progress of each team member and slows down the process of delivery without giving you any justified reasons.

5) How will the development process run?

Every good app agency normally sticks to one approach to the process of product delivery, which they consider the most effective. If they can’t explain why they use this or that methodology, they probably lack professionalism and experience. The process of building a mobile app differs from the process of developing any other software. What is more, working with startups is not the same as engaging with an established enterprise. That’s why you need to clarify every single detail in your collaboration with a team of developers before you entrust them with your project.

We work with startups mostly, so we use Agile, which is the best methodology this world has created to get a mobile product on track to become successful.

5. Hire the best app developer!

Hope you do it.

It would be great to know what you think about this article and if it really helped you figure out how to find an app developer.

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